With my words I do create.

July 23, 2012

What I Really Want to Say When I Gush About Aaron Sorkin

Before beginning this post, I'd like to pose a little something that I found on twitter. But seriously, discuss.

PPS (pre-pre-script), I love The West Wing, I greatly enjoy Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and I like Sports Night, the most innocent of the Sorkin family of behind-the-scenes shows. I haven't seen any of his films. I need to.

I'm disenchanted with Sorkin partly because I believe people on the internet. Based on his interviews he's pompous, he recycles dialogue and characters from ALL his shows and films, and if he couldn't hide behind his brilliant characters who say all the right things, he'd be seen as a liberal bully.

He's writing women pretty poorly in this show so far. I'm not looking for the ideal woman, I'm not looking for a brilliant feminist, and I don't expect him to ever write a female character as well as Joss Whedon thinks he does (another conversation for another time). Caveats aside, as a writer for The Daily put it, "forget everything you learned from Keith Olbermann during your research for the show. If she’ll have you, spend a little time shadowing Rachel Maddow instead. Maybe that way, you’ll quit treating women like frivolous narrative ornaments who only act with agency if it’s in furtherance of a male ego." We should expect this from him. I'll give him credit here: when Emily Mortimer tells Olivia Munn the real reasons she's being hired (ep 2), she's honest. Sexist, but honest.

He should be writing more women like C.J. Cregg and Ainsley Hayes, not women like Natalie Hurley and Dana Whitacre. Yes, Natalie and Dana are closer parallels to Maggie and Mackenzie. But a decade later, the characters should have evolved because the world has evolved just a tiny bit. We get it. It's a man's world out there. Most jobs worth watching on television are male-dominated. But you know what? If we know this to be true, then Sorkin's female characters know it too and shouldn't be written as though every move is a battle to stay afloat in a man's world.

None of this is to say that Sorkin is being untrue to himself or to us. I think he writes with honesty, but that he's honestly a pompous jerk masquarading as someone who likes to pretend that he writes "corny, you know?"

Also despite the little end bit with the reveal about Mac actually being in the audience at Will's Northwestern speech (that bit made me all happy and starry-eyed for a few minutes), his heavy-handed rants and his idealistic rants and his rants rants rants are no longer cute and they're getting less smart. They're just heavy-handed and idealistic.

Basically, Aaron Sorkin is smarter than a lot of us but he makes sure we know it. And Sorkin gives credit where credit is due, but these days he thinks white middle-aged men are the only people who deserve that credit.

Aaron Sorkin, you are smarter than me. I know it and you know it. That's fine. What isn't fine is that you treat me as though you are smarter than me and you know it. Sometimes I'm smart, too (read: different genitals, different perspective).

Part of the problem is Sorkin fans expect more. The West Wing was just what we didn't know we needed - an incredibly smart president and a staff so perfectly picked that we liberals involved with politics couldn't have done it better if we had written ourselves into the story. We needed The West Wing increasingly more as 2000 came and went. Nobody asked for a "fantasy about newscasters," or however Sorkin describes his vision of this newest show. Sorkin is giving us a great cast, cute little metaphors about fantasy and idealism at every turn (Atlantis, Don Quixote, etc), funny quips and fast talking/fast walking. But we didn't ask for it. This comes easy to Sorkin. So now we're asking for more.